The State of
the State's Public Undergraduate and Graduate Physics ProgramsA
Report by the Virginia Task Force on Physics

Executive Summary

The physics programs in the Commonwealth, as in the rest of the nation,
are facing serious challenges, and the way they meet these challenges
will have a significant effect on the technical underpinning for
Virginia's economy in the next century. These challenges have been
exacerbated by fiscal conditions, but their underlying origins are
structural.

Changes in the national economy have decreased traditional
employment opportunities for physics graduates. Meanwhile, the
increasingly diverse range of careers into which they now move or have
ambitions to move require a broader range of skills than are taught in a
traditional physics curriculum.

An otherwise very attractive characteristic of Virginia's colleges
and universities -- their geographic dispersion into relatively small
units -- has created special problems for physics programs. Although
they should play a vital role in the liberal education of all students
and in providing foundational knowledge to other majors in science and
engineering, they typically attract relatively few majors. But physics
programs require a critical mass of faculty for excellence in research
and graduate teaching, and a vibrant research program is in turn
increasingly important for the "hands-on" training of
undergraduates.

While various of our colleges and universities have had some isolated
successes in addressing these conditions, the picture put together by
the task force --- based on submitted materials, site visits, and
knowledge of both Virginia and the national scene --- is troubling.

At the same time, the current state of stress also offers an opportunity
for change which might not have existed otherwise. Our recommendations
are designed to 1) preserve the strengths of existing programs while
correcting some of their anachronisms, 2) bring the Commonwealth's many
relatively small programs together into teaching and research alliances,
and 3) identify special opportunities in Virginia on which physics
departments can focus to attain national status in selected strategic
areas.

All physics programs at all levels should rigorously examine their
curricula to assess the balance in the education they offer in view of
the wide spectrum of employment opportunities their graduates will have
in the future.

While there were notable exceptions, the task force discovered that a
narrow academic orientation in physics training was the rule in the
Commonwealth's colleges and universities. Baccalaureate and master's
programs measure themselves almost exclusively in terms of their success
in placing students in graduate school, while Ph.D. programs focused on
the number of potential professors they produce. This drive to replicate
academicians might once have made sense, but now it certainly does
not.

In making this criticism, we are not suggesting a radical change in the
fundamental character of an education in physics. Physics is one of the
liberal-arts disciplines and provides students with fundamental
problem-solving skills. That is why the role of the physics department
in general education and in the foundational learning of students in
other sciences and engineering is so critical -- the task force believes
that all students, and certainly physics majors, should have a solid
grounding in "problem-solving, physics style."

However, surveys of physics graduates make it abundantly clear that it
is the mode of thought and not the facts per se which are the
core strengths of a physics education. There are today few job
opportunities in pure physics but myriad job opportunities for
physicists. These jobs require the problem-solving skills of a physicist
much more than the detailed information of a physics degree. More
important in most cases, today's employment requires an appropriate mix
with many other skills not traditionally taught in physics education. Many
physics programs across the state currently are unintentionally
short-changing their students in these nontraditional areas of
training.

From this perspective, physics curricula need to add new skills to the
repertoire of physics graduates that can be vital to their future career
success. There is a widespread belief that courses in communication
skills and business could be valuable to many students. There is also
growing evidence that the hands-on and teamwork skills that can be
developed in laboratory-based senior project courses or internships are
crucial for the job market of today and of the future. For a long time,
research projects for majors have been recognized as a significant part
of the most successful undergraduate programs, even though not all
programs have provided or emphasized such experiences. On the other
hand, internships are not a part of the physics culture at most
institutions.

The physics curriculum could also be broadened in other ways. For
example, in addition to traditional academic training, some colleges and
universities might have students specialize in advanced data-acquisition
techniques, while others might focus on preparing them for advanced
degrees in engineering, work in the business world, or careers in
high-school or community-college teaching.

Physics programs across the Commonwealth should form alliances with
other programs (in physics and in related disciplines) to broaden their
course offerings, to create programs with more diverse foci, and to
strengthen their research efforts through increased specialization and
interuniversity collaboration.

The geographic dispersion and relatively small size of Virginia's
colleges and universities give many advantages to their physics
programs. Among these are the ability (with faculty sizes from two to
over thirty) to offer the intense, one-on-one or one-on-several contact
required to retain students in physics in their first and second years.
Indeed, the task force found that very small departments often did an
outstanding job supporting students' learning in these critical early
years.

From the third undergraduate year through graduate school, the
separation of the system into small, isolated units seems to have
substantial disadvantages. The smaller schools have great difficulty in
exposing their students to a broad range of advanced topics in the third
and fourth years or in offering the opportunity for all seniors to work
on research projects. Even the larger schools --- all with graduate
programs --- have more complete (though for some students less
supportive) undergraduate programs but have difficulty in offering a
broad range of advanced graduate courses.

Even these latter departments --- while large for Virginia --- are
small when compared to the best research departments in the country.
When peers assess the quality of each other's programs, according to the
National Research Council, size matters,(1) among other reasons because
relatively small departments in the sciences have the very serious
problem of being subcritical in the size of some of their key research
groups. By comparison, the nation's top ten comprehensive research
physics departments average about 53 faculty, almost 20 more than the
largest Virginia department.

None of these problems can be realistically addressed by the current
departmental units acting in isolation. In contrast, alliances between
units offer solutions which at the same time avoid unnecessary
duplication of teaching and research efforts. For example:

Small undergraduate programs could offer a more
diverse set of courses in upper years by using postdoctoral fellows and
advanced graduate students from another institution as supplementary
faculty members. These young researchers would, in addition to earning
money, gain valuable teaching experience under the tutelage of some of
the Commonwealth's finest teachers.

Departments could form alliances to permit students who start their
course of study at one college to complete it at another. Many physics
students we talked to expressed career interests -- for instance in
engineering or computer science -- that could be supported by
articulation agreements like the 3+2 program Longwood College's physics
program has with the College of Engineering at Old Dominion University.
Another kind of cooperation occurs when institutions form partnerships
to share courses and bring in guest speakers, such as the ones Longwood
and VMI have formed with Hampden-Sydney and Washington and Lee.

Research departments that are currently limited to offering
important advanced topics only every two or three years could share the
load of such courses by allowing students to take courses by two-way
videoconferencing or other telecommunicated modes of delivery.

Through cooperation and sharing of resources, smaller faculty groups
could have greater impact in research. One way to do this is to focus
their research interests and faculty hiring more narrowly and then rely
on partner institutions for breadth in teaching their students. Another
possibility is to exploit natural strengths of the other research
opportunities in the Commonwealth. Among these are the Thomas Jefferson
National Accelerator Facility (the "Jefferson Lab," formerly the
Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility or CEBAF), with its $600
million of nuclear and particle physics infrastructure and
"fourth-generation" Free Electron Laser (FEL) light source, currently
under construction; NASA's Langley Research Center; and the industrial
laboratories of advanced-technology industries locating in Virginia.
Such cooperation will also call for advanced videoconferencing
facilities and enhanced opportunities for faculty and students to work
together at both their universities and distant sites, as envisioned by
the recently formed Virginia Physics Consortium (VPC) The VPC is a
collaboration of the doctoral-granting institutions in physics, Norfolk
State University, and the Jefferson Lab, whose mission is to "provide
the framework and resources for coordinating the [teaching and research]
activities of its members in physics and in related disciplines and
technologies, especially those activities focused on the facilities for
nuclear physics, particle physics, atomic-molecular-optical physics, and
condensed matter physics at the [Jefferson Lab]."

Physics programs should communicate and work more actively with
their various constituencies, including other departments on campus,
feeder high schools and community colleges, their alumni, local
businesses and industry, and -- last but certainly not least -- their
own students.

The task force found on its campus visits that physics faculty are
typically very dedicated and hard working. But between the demands of
the classroom and the laboratory, their mentoring of individual students
and study groups, and their own research, the faculty often have little
time or energy to spare for looking beyond their own program's
boundaries, let alone the institution's walls. Nevertheless, it is vital
to the continued health of Virginia's physics programs that they do so.
For example:

Physics programs need to be major players in the
campus-wide general-education program, which means that they need to put
time and energy into the development of physics and interdisciplinary
science courses for non-majors. They also feed (and are fed by) other
curricula: they need to rely on departments of mathematics, for
instance, to help teach their students quantitative problem-solving
skills, just as engineering schools rely on them to teach their
majors the fundamentals of physics. The task force found that the
faculty in many physics programs had not successfully bridged the gaps
between them and their colleagues in other programs. Consequently, it
was left to the students to leap those gaps, which they were not always
able to do successfully. Moreover, too many physics departments fail to
exploit alliances with other departments within their own institutions
that could be useful in broadening the skills of physics majors.
Mathematics, computer science, education, business, and law departments,
to name a few, may have (or could arrange to have) offerings of great
value to physics students. Interdisciplinary offerings might be the
logical extension of such cooperation. Faculty can also cooperate across
departments in exploring new educational delivery systems. There is
usually a limited number of faculty on any one campus interested in
these issues -- they need to be networked to provide mutual stimulation
and promote efficiency.

Physics faculty need to communicate with students in primary
schools, secondary schools, and community colleges, lest the pool in
which they fish dry up. A recent study done at Wellesley College found
that only 4 percent of the science majors there did not think that they
would major in science when they came to the college.(2) Students
--especially women and minorities -- need to know well before the eighth
grade that science is an interesting pursuit, since that is when they
decide whether to take the mathematics and science courses that will
enable them to move smoothly into a collegiate science curriculum. The
teachers they have in these early grades can feed or kill that interest,
depending on how knowledgeable they are about how best to reach those
students. The task force was heartened by what it saw in this area: many
departments have active outreach programs to the schools, both directly
through lectures and demonstrations to students and indirectly through
nationally and state-sponsored programs geared at updating teachers on
the latest developments in research and pedagogy. Community colleges are
another important source of potential physics majors, but very few
senior institutions' physics departments mention efforts to ensure that
their programs couple smoothly with the community-college curriculum.
The task force encourages physics faculty to talk regularly both with
high-school and community-college science faculty at their major feeder
institutions so that students will not experience discontinuities in
their education and be discouraged from pursuing the study of physics
and other sciences.

Alumni are an untapped resource on most campuses. Unfortunately very
few physics departments have kept track of their undergraduate or
graduate alumni. They could be used to inform, mentor, and support
students in a number of ways: by serving on panels to explore with
students their varied career choices and how to prepare for them, by
providing internships for students, and by advising faculty on the
relevance of the curriculum, for instance. We suggest that programs
locate their alumni and set up homepages and alumni listserves, perhaps
maintained by students in the program, as one easy way to keep in touch
with and make use of their graduates.

Local businesses and industries are another important resource that
is too often overlooked. They could enrich the real-life relevancy of
programs by serving on advisory committees, providing internships, and
becoming employers of programs' graduates.

In focusing on the need to communicate with constituencies outside
the program, the task force does not want the faculty to overlook the
most important constituency of all: their students. On each campus we
visited, students were pleased with the opportunity to speak as a group
about their program. Too often, they do not have that opportunity on a
regular basis. This is not to say that faculty do not communicate with
students individually or in small groups, but those conversations
generally focus on the physics problems that are engaging their
attention at the moment. Larger issues -- like the success of the
curriculum or the range of non-traditional job opportunities for
students -- are too rarely addressed systematically. The exiting senior
surveys that some departments have instituted for purposes of assessment
are promising in that regard, but the task force recommends that they be
supplemented with regular town meetings at which students' concerns can
be addressed.

To be able to act as a community these various ways, faculty need also
to communicate with each other and with their administrations regularly
and civilly. In some of the programs, the diversity of interests and
time constraints limit that dialogue. But such intradepartmental and
departmental/administration communication is crucial, not only because
it permits programs to get their essential business done but because it
models for students how groups of people can work cooperatively in a
world in which few people work alone.

Virginia's women and minorities remain very underrepresented in
physics programs, and more serious effort should be focused on
correcting this imbalance.

While many of the root causes of the underrepresentation of women and
minorities in physics programs are probably societal in origin, it has
been clearly demonstrated that sustained outreach programs addressed to
K-12 students can have an effect on the problem. It is also clear that
poor retention rates are at least in part due to inhospitable
environments in many physics programs. While white male faculty can be,
and in many programs in Virginia clearly are, very welcoming to and
supportive of their women and minority students, it is also useful for
those students to have models of success who look like them. Yet the
lone black or female faculty member is apt to feel isolated and
overburdened with the responsibility of being the only such role model
in the department. So an important step in increasing student diversity
is to move faculty representation above a "critical mass" by actively
recruiting and removing all obstacles to the retention and promotion of
qualified women and minority faculty members and by creating a
supportive environment for students.

Virginia's physics programs should keep better track of their costs
and benefits, and they should implement the suggestions in this report
through well-prepared plans with milestones coupled to external reviews
reporting to the provost. The entire system of programs should then be
reexamined in four years for evidence of progress along the lines
recommended in this report. SCHEV should work with the Virginia Physics
Consortium to set up an interim review process, including an annual
meeting of program representatives, to facilitate the communication
required for effective system-wide change.

The task force is convinced that physics programs that are unable to
meet the needs of their students and their communities will lose their
vitality and in most cases will not survive. It therefore strongly urges
departments to embark on the process of critical self-examination,
planning, and external review required for effective change.

In summary, the Virginia Task Force on Physics has concluded that by
implementing these recommendations, existing institutional resources in
Virginia could allow the Commonwealth to become a model and a more
important national player in physics and its related disciplines and
technologies. Given the importance of such strength for the future of
Virginia, we urge the Council of Higher Education to adopt these
recommendations and carefully monitor the health of this important set
of programs.

In 1995 the staff of the State Council of Higher Education decided to do
this review of all the public undergraduate and graduate physics
programs in the state, its first statewide disciplinary study since
1986. The origins of that decision reach back into the previous decade.
In 1986, the Council had decided that the combination of productivity
review and the newly instituted statewide assessment program was
sufficient to ensure the quality of Virginia's academic degree programs.
By 1995, several developments led to a reconsideration of that decision.
The turbulent nineties, with massive budget cutbacks followed by
restructuring and partial restoration of public funding, had required a
fundamental reexamination of how the Commonwealth's colleges and
universities accomplish their missions. The Council staff thought that
such a reexamination was incomplete without an attempt to look at
collegiate education within at least one core discipline.

This decision to do a statewide disciplinary review was strengthened by
several other developments:

In its report on the work of the Council, the Joint
Legislative Audit and Review Committee had declared that the Council's
productivity review process needed to be strengthened by, among other
things, the review of programs "collectively by subject area."

Second, the General Assembly's Commission on the Future of Higher
Education had expressed concern about the unnecessary duplication of
degree programs. This concern was later embodied in a revision to the
Council's statutory responsibilities: the 1996 General Assembly asked it
to consider unnecessary duplication as an issue when it reviewed the
productivity of programs. The core liberal-arts disciplines pose a
special set of questions in this respect: are they necessary to any
college or university, however low the students numbers in them are? Is
there any way to improve their attractiveness to students rather than
close them?

Finally, budget cutbacks and the General Assembly's mandate that the
public colleges and universities restructure meant that on many
campuses, the curriculum in general and high-cost programs in particular
were already under intense scrutiny.

If the Council was going to undertake a statewide review of one of the
core disciplines, physics was an obvious choice, since it embodies the
all the most difficult challenges in program review. On the one hand it
is a liberal-arts discipline that attempts to describe the very
structures of reality, it develops in students essential problem-solving
skills, and it has enormous economic-development potential in training
people to work with advanced technologies. On the other, at some
institutions it has had difficulty attracting students, particularly
women and minority students, into its general-education courses and into
the major; its graduates, like those in other core liberal-arts (and
even more vocational) disciplines, have recently had difficulty finding
academic, program-related employment; and it is a relatively costly
program to offer.

Physics also has some strengths that other programs lack. Physics
departments are often important to their institutions because of their
frequently high level of sponsored research when compared to other
departments. Researchers in Virginia benefit from the presence in the
state of such entities as NASA Langley, IBM/Toshiba, and Motorola. The
presence in the state of the Jefferson Lab (formerly CEBAF), one of the
world's premier high-energy physics research facilities, was
particularly important, and its willingness to co-sponsor the physics
review was critical to the review's success, because of the credibility
and support such co-sponsorship lent the process and its results. As
well, around the Jefferson Lab has coalesced a group of researchers from
all over the state. This has led to the development of the Virginia
Physics Consortium, a model for cooperative efforts in research and
education.

Finally, the national physics community has grappled more than scholars
in almost any other area with the difficulties besetting their
discipline. The presence on the Virginia Task Force on Physics (VTFP),
formed in fall 1995, of two officers of the American Physical Society
brought the benefits of that national conversation to Virginia. The
conversation was further broadened by a high-level industrial
representative on the task force, in the person of a retired vice
president for IBM, Science and Technology. Other members were physicists
from the Jefferson Lab, Council staff, and physics faculty and students
from Virginia's colleges and universities.

The task force saw it as the mission of Virginia's physics programs
to

Produce excellent and diverse students at the
bachelor's, master's, and doctoral levels who are trained in a broad
range of skills for today's competitive job market.

Create a research climate conducive to supporting both basic
research and high-technology industry in the Commonwealth.

Provide part of the broad scientific and technical foundation
required by other scientific, engineering, medical, and business
disciplines and contribute to the general education of all college
students in Virginia.

The VTFP designed a review that aimed not at identifying programs that
might be eliminated but at determining the current strengths and
weaknesses of the existing set of programs in the state in order to make
recommendations on how they could be improved to meet these goals.

The review has occurred in several stages. After consulting with the
college presidents, the chief academic officers, the relevant deans, and
the physics department heads, the task force asked each program in the
state to submit a self-study by mid-December. In January, February, and
March, smaller teams of task force members visited six of the state's
thirteen senior institutions with physics programs to get a closer look
at a wide variety of programs serving different kinds of students in
very different settings. The information thus collected has led to the
recommendations in this report.

The study of physics programs in Virginia has taken place in the context
of a much larger national discussion. As is true for most of the
scientific disciplines in the U.S., this is a time of considerable
turmoil and uncertainty for physics. This is true whether the focus is
on the teaching of physics at college and university levels or on
research.

This uncertainty is not due to any conviction, held widely by scientists
at the end of the 19th century, that we are near the end of what can
usefully be discovered about the physical world. On the contrary, many
sub-fields of physics are as vigorous and exciting intellectually as
they have ever been. It is not that nature is running out of mysteries;
rather, it is that what has been America's increasing interest in and
support for solving them seems to be flagging.

Moreover, physics continues to be recognized as a core discipline, not
only in the study of nature but also in the preparation of many other
types of scientists, doctors, and engineers. This is reflected in the
fact that physics departments nationally continue to "provide service
courses for other majors and enrolled approximately 360,000 students in
introductory physics courses in 1994-95."(3)

The turmoil in physics education is due rather to political and economic
factors that have affected all the physical sciences and engineering.
The explosive support for physics in particular following World War II,
and especially after the launch of Sputnik, was fueled in large part by
the imperatives of the Cold War. This support entailed the infusion of
massive amounts of federal funding for research and the concomitant
exponential growth of both the national labs and university physics
programs. The physical sciences were widely, and correctly, seen to be
fundamental to the creation of a strong national defense. With the end
of the Cold War , other issues have come to the fore, and a consequence
has been diminished national commitment to leadership in this and other
branches of the physical sciences and engineering. According to the
National Science Foundation, spending on the medical sciences went up 88
percent between 1987 and 1994 while support for physics increased by
about 40 percent, "less than for any other major discipline" in science.
"'The century of physics is over,' says Robert L. Park, director of
public information for the American Physical Society. "We're entering
the century of biology.'"(4)

Thus it is widely believed that given bipartisan pressures to balance
the federal budget, federal support of research and graduate education
in the physical sciences -- including physics, and engineering -- will
not increase for at least six or seven years but may in fact decline
over the next decade by anywhere from 10 to 30 percent in real terms.
Meanwhile large-laboratory industrial support for research in physics,
and hence the demand for physics researchers, has also decreased
somewhat in recent years. The reasons for this are complex and related
to global competition, and the likely duration of the cutbacks in
industrial research in the physical sciences is not certain. Finally,
universities are facing not only increased competition for federal
dollars but stagnant or declining state support, leading them to look
much more critically at expensive programs, especially those without
large numbers of students in them.

And student interest in physics, as measured by undergraduate major and
entering graduate student numbers, has flagged. This is partly due to
the responsible way the physics community has acted in the present
circumstances. In the last few years, the community, through the
American Institute of Physics(AIP) and the American Physical Society
(APS), has been providing up-to-date and realistic data on the current
and near-term future for traditional employment of physicists,
especially at the doctoral level. This has had the expected effect of
modest but measurable decline in the number of physics majors at the
bachelor's level and entering graduate-student level: national trends in
enrollment, summarized annually by the AIP, have been downward. For
example, over the four-year period ending in 1995, the enrollment of
juniors in physics programs dropped to the level that obtained in 1980,
which was itself a thirty-year low. Similarly, during the last three
years, entering graduate enrollments in physics nationally have dropped
by 22 percent in Ph.D-granting departments and by 17 percent in
masters-granting departments,(5) although due to the time lag for Ph.D.
graduation, the number of doctorates awarded will not begin to decline
noticeably until the 1998-99 academic year.

These decreases reflect awareness on the part of prospective physics
undergraduate and graduate students of the current decline in employment
possibilities in traditional jobs directly involving physics. Less well
recognized by students and faculty alike, however, and becoming more
important over time, is the movement of engineers and scientists,
including physicists, into less traditional careers: state and local
government, finance, banking, medicine, law, multimedia, big business,
and young entrepreneurial businesses. In the past, many of these
opportunities were filled by humanities and social science majors who
later specialized in their graduate education in business, medicine or
law. More recently, students prepared themselves for many of these
careers by specializing in business as undergraduates. Today, many
baccalaureate science and engineer majors, both undergraduate and
graduate, are moving into these non-traditional careers, often with
great success.

With the rapid development and ubiquity of technology and the
development of the information society, graduates who have a good
foundation in mathematics, the physical sciences, and computers --
especially those who have writing and communications skills -- are at a
great advantage in the employment market. For example, a recent
newspaper article on the improved job prospects of this year's college
graduates quotes a Signet Bank representative, who says that "this year,
the company hired analyst-type whiz kids' who've excelled in areas such
as math, statistics, or physics.'"(6) A firm foundation in the
mathematical and physical workings of modern technological society
constitutes not only an essential part of a liberal education in the
modern world but the grounding for any career related to technology,
computers, or information and data management.

State and local governments have begun to recognize the importance of
strong science, engineering, technology, and computer programs to
economic development, especially in attracting industries that offer
higher-paying jobs with growth potential. Motorola's decision to locate
its microchip facilities near Richmond, based partly on the proximity of
such programs to train its workers, is replicated every day in places
such as California's Silicon Valley; North Carolina's Research Triangle
Park; Austin, Texas; and the Route 128 corridor around Boston,
Massachusetts.

For these partnerships to work, however, ties must be developed and
nurtured which benefit both parties. There are too many instances in
which colleges and universities (and sometimes individual departments
within them) remain separated from their local and regional communities.
Virginia's state economic-development and higher-education agencies have
developed near-term and long-term strategies to promote the connection
between the state's colleges and universities and its new industries,
such as the $7 million Motorola and IBM fund that should ensure the
capacity to hire and retain first-rate engineering faculty.

Recommendation:

that state economic-development and higher-education agencies should
support Virginia's colleges' and universities' attempts to enhance their
educational programs in physics in ways that open up and demonstrate new
opportunities to graduates in fields not normally thought to require a
background in physics but for which it is excellent preparation. Such
efforts should be recognized as promoting economic development for local
communities and the state.

The physics programs in the Commonwealth's universities and colleges
reflect the diversity of sizes, locations, and missions of the
institutions (see Table 1). The programs range widely in student and
faculty numbers, numbers of options, and clientele. At the same time
they have, not surprisingly, many similarities. Perhaps more than any
other core academic discipline, physics has an extremely
well-established canon. When faculty members from different institutions
discuss their programs, they rarely focus on what subjects or concepts
are taught; rather they are apt to discuss what textbooks they use for,
say, the electricity and magnetism course or for the mechanics
course.

This coherence is a strength in many ways: because of the central
position that physics occupies in both a thorough liberal-arts education
and a solid scientific and technical education, the integrity of the
discipline is important. However, the concordance may reflect a weakness
as well -- an unwillingness or an historical lack of necessity for the
discipline to extend itself or broaden its scope. In this regard, the
diversity of programs in the Commonwealth is encouraging: they
constitute a rich gene pool from which the most successful curricula for
various types of students can develop.

All but two of the Comonwealth's fifteen senior institutions offer
bachelor's degrees with majors in physics. In addition, nine of the
institutions offer master's and four offer doctoral degrees. With
similar core curricula, they differ in the following ways:

Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia offer a
full range of undergraduate and graduate courses and degrees in the
settings of major research universities. William and Mary offers similar
programs, but in an environment that is largely that of a liberal-arts
college.

Old Dominion University is conscious of its position as the
Commonwealth's only physics Ph.D.-granting institution in an urban
setting and explicitly recognizes and works to accommodate the variety
of students that are attracted to its programs. ODU's proximity to the
Jefferson Laboratory and NASA Langley gives it access to major research
facilities, and the university's commitment to building the program's
strength has led to the recent expansion and diversification of its
faculty, the development of new facilities, a 60 percent increase in its
number of graduate students over the past six years, and the potential
to become a nationally recognized department.

Christopher Newport has a similar commitment, in its undergraduate
and master's programs, to the working adult. Its applied physics program
is offered by a department where physics is joined with computer
engineering, computer science, and information science. It draws on
those academic areas in preparing students to work in the
microelectronics industry.

George Mason's undergraduate and master's programs take
advantage of the physics department's close ties with George Mason's
Institute for Computational Sciences and Informatics to prepare their
mostly working adult students for employment in the high-technology
companies and laboratories in Northern Virginia. In contrast to CNU, the
program attempts to train generalists, although ones with strength in
computation.

With a relatively small number of faculty, VCU has chosen to
concentrate on a single area of expertise, condensed matter physics, in
order to be able to offer several courses related to the fundamentals
and applications of this technologically important field. With the
arrival of Motorola in the area, opportunities will exist for this
department, in cooperation with VCU's new School of Engineering, to
establish significant industrial ties.

Virginia State and Norfolk State have traditionally served the
African-American population of Virginia and the nation. While they are
becoming more diverse, both institutions work toward increasing the
number of African-American physicists at both the baccalaureate and
master's levels. Since the national record for producing minority
scientists is dismal -- approximately one-half of one percent of the
Ph.D.s in physics are earned by African-Americans -- both institutions
are committed to nuturing black students to go on to doctoral programs.

Four institutions offer only the baccalaureate degree in physics.
Happily, after considerable disruption, James Madison's physics program
has conditional approval for a physics major with three different
tracks: fundamental studies, which will prepare students for graduate
work; applied physics, focused on preparing them for jobs in business
and industry; and a 3 +2 physics/engineering program.

The last is similar to the very successful program at Longwood
College, which provides entry to undergraduate or graduate programs in
engineering for students who prefer a smaller college environment and
for students who may not be prepared to go directly from high school
into a selective and competitive engineering program. Longwood attracts
and graduates a remarkably large number of students. Mary Washington
College, like Longwood, has a very small number of faculty who nurture
students in a small liberal-arts college setting.

Finally, VMI's physics program operates in a unique institution. The
program provides not only a physics degree to its most academically
well-qualified students but also the foundational support to its other
programs in the sciences and engineering, disciplines strongly stressed
in its mission statement.

As it visited institutions and read reports, the task force identified a
number of practices that it considered exemplary in the programs, as
well as some weaknesses. What follows is a list of recommendations to
the physics programs in Virginia and examples of how some institutions
have shown how these recommendations might be addressed.

Undergraduate physics majors within the Commonwealth are being given a
wide range of concepts with which to understand the physical world. It
seems to the task force that these core concepts are being taught with
academic rigor at every institution, although some programs have greater
strength in their lower-division and some in their upper-division
courses. As a result, some programs are able to develop students who
might well transfer into other majors at less nurturing institutions.
However, the task force also concludes that when they reach the
upper-division courses, those students may not have access to a wide
enough range of advanced courses. At the graduate level, almost all
institutions could benefit from a broadening of their course offerings.
Therefore, the task force makes the following

Recommendation:

that programs in the Commonwealth cooperate in offering courses to
students at all levels of the curriculum.

Subsidiary recommendations:

Small undergraduate programs should make use of the
teaching resources of nearby research institutions to enrich the
learning opportunities of their students. They might do this by inviting
postdoctoral and advanced graduate students from those institutions to
teach courses, in exchange for which they would receive adjunct pay, the
mentoring of some of the best physics teachers in the Commonwealth, and
experience in the kind of teaching job to which many of them aspire.

Departments can also form alliances across institutions to permit
students who start their course of study at one college to complete it
at another. Many physics students we talked to expressed career
interests -- for instance in engineering or computer science -- that
could be supported by articulation agreements.

For example

Longwood College's 3+2 program, -- in which physics students
transfer in their fourth year to Old Dominion University, where they
complete an engineering degree -- is a model that might be widely
imitated.

Institutions can form partnerships to share the teaching of
upper-level and specialized courses, bring in guest speakers, and
support and do cross-assessments of senior research projects.

For example

Longwood and VMI have formed partnerships with Hampden-Sydney
and Washington and Lee, respectively, to co-sponsor visiting lecturers.
In the past, Longwood relied on a Hampden-Sydney faculty member to teach
one of its advanced courses at Longwood, and students can take classes
in either department.

Virginia State University has a similar arrangement with Virginia
Commonwealth University, which should be more widely advertised to
students.

George Mason has been involved in the Consortium for Upper-Level
Physics Software (CUPS), in which about 30 physicists from around the
world have joined to develop software packages that are now coming on
the market to outstanding reviews.

Research departments that are currently forced to offer important
advanced topics only every two or three years could share the
responsibility of such courses by allowing students to take courses by
commuting to neighboring institutions, two-way video-conferencing or
other telecommunicated instruction between more distant institutions, or
semester-length mini-sabbaticals for the teaching faculty. The Virginia
Physics Consortium could be the coordinating body for such efforts.

For example

In another discipline, the Virginia Consortium for Engineering
and Science (VCES), formed in 1993 and headquartered in Hampton, has
successfully organized a network among Virginia's graduate science and
engineering schools. This consortium offers video-linked courses and
cross-registration of course credits among the participating
institutions.

As we have mentioned several times in this report, one of the most
pressing issues that physics programs face is the need to inform
students about and prepare them for a much broader range of careers than
has been true in the past. Indeed, fewer than half the students polled
by the task force visiting teams intended to pursue a career directly
related to academic or research physics. While the undergraduates
generally felt hopeful about their career possibilities, the graduate
students were less sanguine about the degree to which their programs
prepared them for, informed them about, and encouraged them to pursue
non-traditional careers.

As the descriptions above make clear, some departments have addressed
that challenge head-on, for instance by designing professional master's
programs geared to a specific job market. Others do an excellent job of
providing their undergraduate students with a liberal-arts education
grounded in analytic and problem-solving skills that should serve the
students well in a wide range of careers. But the process of ensuring
that curricula meet the needs of program graduates is a continuous one.
Therefore, the task force makes the following

Recommendation:

that all physics programs at all levels rigorously examine their
curricula to assess the balance in the education they offer in view of
the wide spectrum of employment opportunities their graduates will have
in the future.

Subsidiary recommendations:

Programs should have clear curricular goals, developed in
consultation with employers, alumni, and students. They should then
assess student learning and survey students, alumni, and employers to
assure themselves and their constituents that they actually develop
those skills and impart that knowledge, and that they have prepared
their students for their lives as citizens and workers. These goals and
results will help them continuously improve their curricula and decide
in what areas any new hires should be made.

For example

Longwood College provided the task force with very good
information about what its graduates are doing and their grade-point
averages at Old Dominion University and other institutions to which they
had transferred.

The interdisciplinary and pragmatic curriculum of James Madison
University's College of Integrated Science and Technology is an
innovative attempt to prepare students to work in the business of
science and technology. The magnitude of the investment and scope of
this effort, as well as its potential to serve as a model, makes
evaluation of this program essential. Careful assessment of student
learning and the tracking of graduates should also enable the college to
continually adjust its curriculum to effect an optimal balance between
the rigors of a traditional science curriculum and the practicalities of
a more workforce-oriented one.

Programs should require that all students have practical experience
in problem-solving, physics-style. This may be a senior research
project, a practicum, or an internship. Such projects can serve as
culminating and integrating experiences for students, and they often
lead to more informed career choices. Faculty should be recognized and
given formal teaching credit for establishing placements for and
supervising the research of students.

For example:

One student wrote the task force to suggest that faculty
formally list their research activities to enable students to match
their interests with the appropriate mentor. The department's homepage
would be a logical place to post such a list.

The senior research project at the College of William and Mary is
recognized by both faculty and students as a central element of the
undergraduate major. The students appear to put considerable thought
into the choice of the research project, and there are a large range of
possibilities available in the physics and applied science departments
and at the Jefferson Lab, NASA Langley, and industrial sites.

At Old Dominion University, all undergraduates are guaranteed the
opportunity to complete a practicum, in addition to the requirement for
a senior thesis in the physics program. While the senior thesis and
practicum can be combined and may involve work at the Jefferson Lab or
NASA Langley, the practicum may be fulfilled in other ways as well. The
use in non-traditional settings of skills developed as a physics major
can demonstrate to students the transferability of those skills.

Students at Norfolk State University have a rich array, and unusual
awareness, of research opportunities. Undergraduates participate in
internships and summer research projects to an impressive extent, and
the required senior project (and its assessment) is one of the program's
excellent features.

Programs should ensure that their students can and do develop key
skills that lie outside the traditional physics currciulum, such as oral
communications and computer skills. Physics faculty should stress and
give students the opportunity to practice those skills within the
physics program, develop interdisciplinary offerings, and remove
barriers -- such as rigid tracks for progression or faculty disapproval
-- that prevent motivated students from taking courses, dual majors, or
strong minors in other fields. In turn, physics departments might
consider developing a physics minor for students majoring in business or
public policy. Institutions should remove barriers that prevent students
from taking appropriate courses in other programs, such as extra tuition
charges or other forms of discouragement.

For example:

The program at Christopher Newport University, rather than
focusing primarily on traditional graduate-school-bound undergraduates,
is adapted to its environment and clientele. In an innovative department
where physics is joined by computer sciences, the applied physics
program is oriented toward microelectronics and fits with the
computer-related programs offered by the department.

The University of Virginia's recently revised Bachelor of Arts in
Physics is an innovative adaptation of the physics curriculum for those
students not planning to go on to graduate school. It permits those
students to take more applied courses that illustrate and integrate basic
scientific principles for the advanced theoretical physics courses taken
by the Bachelor of Science students in the fourth year.

Advising is a key component of the preparation of students for the
world of work. While they seemed quite satisfied with the guidance they
received from faculty in the study of physics, students uniformly
complained about career advising. Faculty need to give systematic
attention to informing themselves and then advising students about the
wide variety of careers open to them, including work in business and
industry and teaching in primary and secondary schools and in community.
Many faculty find it difficult to counsel students about non-academic
job opportunities -- contacts in business and industry need to be
developed for this, if for no other reason. Faculty need also to meet
with groups of students regularly to discuss possible careers, possibly
supplemented by career seminars and panels of alumni who describe their
working lives and how students might prepare for the realities of the
working world.

For example:

George Mason University physics and astronomy students are
provided with a handbook that not only explains the requirements for the
degrees but provides candid and useful information about physics,
physics employment prospects, the university, the physics department,
the Society of Physics Students (SPS) club, why one might consider
graduate school, and several other related topics. The page on "How Can
I Improve My Chances of Getting a Good Job?" should alert students at an
early stage to begin thinking about and preparing for their employment
ambitions.

Many programs are trying to provide more help to students, both in
the form of explicit inclusion of skills that are valued in the
workplace and in the form of more and better placement assistance.
Alumni are beginning to be recognized as a major resource for career
planning and as a network for job placement.

Most physics departments consider their primary role to lie in offering
a major program of study in physics and introductory courses for other
science majors. But their role in providing general education core
courses has taken on added significance in the nineties. The liberal
education of all students requires scientific literacy. According to the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, "Science is one of
the liberal arts and should be taught as such." Only with a basic
understanding of science will people be "empowered to participate more
fully and fruitfully in their chosen professions and in civic
affairs."(7)

For many years introductory physics courses tended to be specialized and
usually geared toward the science major. But over the last decade,
increased emphasis on the need for more science education has resulted
in many new general-education course offerings in an attempt to make
physics more attractive for students who enter college with increasingly
diverse preparation, interest, and abilities in mathematics and the
sciences. Many physics programs have developed courses on topics that
address questions students actually have about the natural world -- such
as those associated with energy, light, sound, and music -- to fill this
need.

To some scholars, this development has not been welcome. A recent report
by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), for instance, includes in
its chapter entitled "The Decline of Rigor" a description of the changes
in the science requirements of colleges and universities nationwide in
the years from 1914 to 1993. The NAS is particularly concerned about the
tendency of such courses to "contain less mathematics [and to be] less
likely to have laboratory requirements."(8) However, as the NAS report
itself acknowledges, "Non-science majors may learn more if they are not
overburdened by having to master techniques and skills for which they
have little aptitude and will have little use." Moreover, traditional
courses geared to the majors, in order to cover all the content
knowledge that potential majors need to progress in the physics
curriculum, have sometimes resulted in the memorization of facts and
solutions to problems rather than providing students opportunities to
learn and practice the means by which they were solved or to provide a
coherent and comprehensible overview of the scientific enterprise.

Given these observations, the task force makes the following

Recommendation:

that physics programs pay more attention to and reward faculty for the
development of new general-education courses.

For example:

Virginia Commonwealth University has asked one physics professor
to focus his energies on revamping the department's general-education
courses. Changes include use of the new teaching technologies.

A course that has been especially successful in conveying concepts
of physics to students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences is
"How Things Work" at the University of Virginia. Created in 1991 by
Prof. Louis Bloomfield, this course offers a non-conventional view of
physics and science that starts with whole objects and looks inside to
see what makes them work. The course aims to convey an understanding of
the concepts and principles of physics and science by finding them
within specific objects of everyday experience. Interestingly, the
university has supplemented the typical terse catalogue description with
full-color posters placed around campus to acquaint students with this
course and others for non-science majors. Prof. Bloomfield has written a
textbook entitled How Things Work that will be published by John
Wiley & Sons in 1996. Word about the course has spread, and at least
three other state institutions are offering or planning to offer a
similar course. It is not yet clear, however, whether the success of
this new course can be attributed to its non-conventional approach or to
an extraordinary teacher.

Another exciting new development is the publication of The
Sciences: An Integrated Approach by Profs. James Trefil and Robert
Hazen, an outgrowth of their "Great Ideas In Science" course at George
Mason University. In it they integrate physics, astronomy, chemistry,
earth science, and biology in an attempt to make students broadly
literate in science. Such a course would seem eminently appropriate to
replace the usual science requirement for non-science students.

Physics programs face another challenge: providing service courses for
programs for which physics is a prerequisite. They can do this either by
teaching service courses specially designed for students in other
disciplines or by including material appropriate for such students in
their standard introductory courses. In planning such courses, physics
departments should study their own experience with mathematics service
courses. The task force found a nearly ubiquitous frustration among the
physicists it met in the course of the study regarding the failure of
their colleagues in mathematics to consult them about the kinds of
quantitative skills and knowledge physics majors need. (Evidently this
feeling is not confined to Virginia: the University of Rochester decided
not to eliminate its doctoral program in mathematics in part in exchange
for the department's promise to better tailor its calculus courses to
the needs of scientists and engineers.) This frustration should alert
physics faculty to the need to communicate with faculty in programs for
which they are providing the foundational knowledge.

Physics prerequisites for other programs are in some cases critical to
those programs' success: any institution without a strong physics
program will be unable to attract the best pre-med majors, and a weak
physics department can hamstring an engineering school. But those
service requirements can entail a serious strain on departmental
resources when those programs are initiated or grow in size. The numbers
at large universities with major engineering schools are almost
overwhelming; for example, Virginia Tech has more than 3200 non-physics
majors enrolled annually in its service courses. Enrollments such as
these preclude some innovative approaches that are labor, space, and
equipment intensive, such as the "discovery method" developed by
Priscilla Laws and others at Dickinson College, although they still
permit the initiation of others such as the studio physics approach
pioneered by Jack Wilson at RPI. But such enrollments do create the need
for focused attention to the methods of instruction for large lecture
courses. Some departments, rather than resorting to the traditional
solution of "chalking and talking," have made use of new teaching
technologies to increase the amount of active learning in an environment
typically characterized by the enforced passivity of students.

The task force therefore makes the following

Recommendations:

that physics departments work closely with their colleagues in other
departments to ensure that their curricula fit together well, and that
they explore the new teaching techniques and technologies to enable more
active learning in their large lecture courses.

For example:

The two largest audiences for service courses are
usually pre-medical students and engineering students. At the University
of Virginia and Virginia Tech, issues related to the content and
presentation of the courses are handled for the courses for engineers by
joint committees of the engineering school and the physics department.
Thanks to the efforts of the faculty teaching the courses and to the
communication fostered by the committees, student and faculty
satisfaction with the courses has improved.

Applications of technology to the development of new modes of
instructional delivery among state institutions is fragmented, at best.
An exception is Christopher Newport's use of ClassTalk, an interactive
computer system designed to make students more active learners in large
introductory classes. ClassTalk was developed through a cooperative
effort of CNU professors and a local entrepreneur. It is currently in
use at several prestigious institutions, such as Harvard and Carnegie
Mellon, but appears virtually unknown at other Virginia institutions.

The teaching responsibilities of physics departments reach beyond the
campus: physicists share the responsibility for science education at all
levels in the Commonwealth. This can involve direct interaction with
primary- and secondary-school students or community-college students, or
it can focus on the preparation of and in-service education for teachers
in those programs. The task force was pleased to learn that most
institutions have outreach programs with an impressive range of
offerings to K-12 schools, if not to community colleges, from special
courses to strengthen and update teachers' knowledge of physics and
astronomy to visits and lectures at nearby schools.

Recommendation:

that the physics programs in Virginia consider it part of their mission
to ensure the excellence of the entire science education of Virginia's
students, from primary school through the two- and four-year
institutions of higher education.

For example:

At Virginia Tech, the physics department has an impressive array
of outreach activities which have been recently extended into Floyd
County. With grant support, undergraduates serve as mentors to
high-school physics students through the use of electronic mail and
bi-weekly visits.

Similarly, the physics department at the University of Virginia has
a history of providing courses (both face to face and telecommunicated)
and other support for large numbers of K-12 teachers. The department
provided the major initiative for the University of Virginia Center for
Science Education and presently houses the center.

Finally, for over 20 years VMI has worked with precollegiate
institutions at all levels, but particularly high schools, in
stimulating interest in and enthusiasm for science through the design
and use of lecture demonstrations. Teachers from Virginia and almost
every other state and many foreign countries have participated in the
summer workshops. A special workshop for science teachers in Native
American schools was held in 1993, supported by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs.

To judge by those with whom the task force visiting teams talked,
undergraduate students in the physics programs in Virginia are a very
satisfied group. They have every reason to be: their programs generally
have many of the hallmarks of a high-quality undergraduate experience,
as summarized from the literature by the Education Commission of the
States.(9)

Physics programs are characterized, for instance, by high
expectations. Students in the programs reported that they felt
themselves to be an elite group, and their entering grade-point
averages, usually at or near the top for their institution, bear out
that assumption. They are also elite in that course-taking patterns
revealed by national transcript studies suggest that science majors are
generally more confident in their verbal skills than humanities students
are in their quantitative skills.(10) Physics students in Virginia whom
the task force interviewed generally reported that their programs
challenged them significantly, as suggested by the fact that nearly all
said that they had of necessity formed study groups in order to meet the
demands of their programs.

Thus the programs exhibit another characteristic of programs that
work: collaboration. Such cooperative effort not only aids
learning by making students into teachers, it also teaches teamwork
skills that are increasingly necessary in the work world. Student
interaction is a predictor of satisfaction as well. Interaction among
students can be encouraged in a number of ways: group research projects,
the formation of study groups, and an active Society of Physics Students
(SPS) are some that come to mind. The task force talked with students
who proudly reported that their SPS clubs had brought in speakers on
relevant topics, such as the local employment situation, or planned
field trips to appropriate facilities. Another way of facilitating
interaction among students is to establish electronic-mail accounts for
them. This can help create a sense of community at institutions
with a high percentage of commuter students. Finally, during the site
visits, several undergraduate students expressed concern about the lack
of available or dedicated space in the departments for study sessions,
physics-club activities and informal gatherings. Consequently, those
institutions that do not have facilities for undergraduate physics
majors to meet and study in informal settings should consider allocating
space for such activities, again particularly if they have a large
proportion of commuting students.

Some of the programs the task force visited showed respect for
diverse talents and learning styles. The Mary Washington program,
for instance, was praised by students for the variety in teaching styles
of its three faculty members. Longwood College is notable for the degree
to which it takes students who are less sure of themselves or less well
prepared and makes them into credible scientists. These small programs
are also remarkable for their close attention to students during the
early years of study, found to be critical in students' ultimate
success.

Physics programs are generally characterized by a sequential
curriculum that produces a high level of coherence in learning.
In contrast to the typical physics curriculum, the National Association
of Scholars, in agreement with the literature on what makes college work
for students, cites the decrease in the number of courses with
prerequisites in the general-education curriculum as a sign of its
decline in rigor.

Those programs that provide students with opportunities for research
and practica throughout the curriculum are meeting a number of criteria
for excellence: they are providing active learning, the
ongoing practice of learned skills, and synthesizing
experiences for their students. In addition, students in them are
provided with the opportunity to integrate education and
experience. Finally, students with practical experience are much
more employable when they finish their programs.

On some campuses students remarked on their ability to contact
faculty in their labs for immediate feedback on their work. They not
only gained the benefits from fine in-class instruction -- they received
the tutorial help associated with the best kind of college teaching and
learning. According to both common sense and the research on student
success, assessment and prompt feedback and out-of-class
contact with faculty are two more hallmarks of a good undergraduate
education.

The graduate students generally struck the visiting teams as a less
satisfied and less active group than the undergraduates. By the time
students enter graduate school, they seem to be focused less on general
academic preparation and more on preparing themselves for a particular
kind of job, and many expressed uncertainty about whether their programs
had adequately prepared them for or informed them about the world of
work. The task force has concluded that self-contained master's
programs, in particular, should be designed to prepare students for
non-academic employment -- they should all, in short, be professional
rather than "terminal" programs, an unfortunate but sometimes
all-too-descriptive label. And programs have a responsibility to inform
all incoming graduate students about their prospects for employment,
based on the program's record in placing its graduates.

Alumni are a good source of information about what a program's graduates
go on to do, how well the program prepared them for their working lives,
and how it might do the job better for its current students. Some of the
programs were in contact with their alumni on more than a random and
anecdotal basis, while many were not. Besides advising the faculty on
how to keep the curriculum in line with the skills needed in the
workforce, alumni can mentor students in the programs by serving on
panels to explore their varied career choices and how to prepare for
them, as well as by providing internships and an employment network.
When programs solicit that information, help, and advice, they need to
make clear to the alumni and to the students who will become alumni how
they are using the information provided to improve the program.

Recommendation:

that all programs track their undergraduate major and graduate alumni
and make use of alumni contacts as mentors for their students and as
advisors to the faculty. The task force suggests that programs set up
homepages and alumni listserves, perhaps maintained by students in the
program, as one easy way to keep in touch with their graduates.

The task force found on its campus visits that the physics faculty at
Virginia's colleges and universities are typically very dedicated and
hard working. On the whole they seem to be first-rate teachers but
stressed by the competing demands of the classroom, their research
program or laboratories, their mentoring of individual students and
study groups, and the shared administrative duties of their institution.
The ratio of faculty to physics majors was comparatively high, which
allows these students significant opportunities for individual
attention. At the smaller institutions, the entire physics faculty
(usually a small number) was given excellent marks by their number-one
customers, the students. In the larger institutions, the task force had
predictably more mixed impressions, possibly because of the large
service enrollments and possibly to some degree due to the centrality of
research in the lives of faculty who teach at the research
institutions.

Table 2 displays the rounded number of full-time-equivalent
state-supported physics faculty (FTEF) at each institution, the number
of total student credit hours (SCH) taught by each physics department,
the 1994-95 credit hours per FTEF taught in each program, and the total
amount of sponsored research the program reported generating annually.
Sponsored research funds cannot reliably be calculated or compared per
FTEF, since the time periods vary and the staff numbers may have been
different when the research was funded. The degree to which a department
has the "critical mass" of faculty necessary to do high-quality research
is affected not only by its numbers of teaching faculty but by its
non-state-supported faculty and research staff and its
cross-disciplinary interactions. Finally, faculty effort spent in
outreach activities is hard to quantify but is one important component
of program effectiveness.

The physics departments under scrutiny in this study did not express
worry about any imbalance between the role of the faculty member as
teachers and researchers. Although that balance varies according to
institutional type, most physicists see research at some level as a
necessary part of their maintenance and growth as teachers and their
capacity to provide hands-on experience to their students. The visiting
teams did note, however, a very natural concern that there be a fair
distribution of the tasks that make up modern academic life: teaching,
research, administration, and outreach.

TABLE 2FACULTY AND WHAT THEY DO

Institution

FTEF

1994-5
SCH(lower-div)

1994-5 SCH(upper-div)

1994-5
SCH(grad)

TotalSCH/FTEF

Sponsored research
$annual average

CNU

6

2,180

666

315

527

$1,138,221 (1994-95)

GMU

14

1,474

3,483

366

380

$340,978 (1994-95)

JMU

10

3,592

202

21

382

$48,743 (5-yr. average)

LC

2

884

397

0

641

$0

MWC

3

1,326

338

0

555

$0

NSU

8

4,355

332

33

590

$286,500 (1993-96)

ODU

19

6,147

862

940

418

$1,112,387 (1994-95)

UVA

35

11,762

744

3,242

450

$5,474,000 (5-yr. average)

VCU

9

5,983

554

176

746

$397,512 (5-yr. average)

VMI

5

29

1,330

0

272

$0

VPI

31

13,247

1,647

1,033

514

$2,340,000 (1994-95)

VSU

4

1,590

50

92

433

$279,574 (3-yr. average)

W&M

28

3,456

648

1,254

191

$2,046,469 (1991-92)

The physics departments under scrutiny in this study did not express
worry about any imbalance between the role of the faculty member as
teachers and researchers. Although that balance varies according to
institutional type, most physicists see research at some level as a
necessary part of their maintenance and growth as teachers and their
capacity to provide hands-on experience to their students. The visiting
teams did note, however, a very natural concern that there be a fair
distribution of the tasks that make up modern academic life: teaching,
research, administration, and outreach. This observation leads the task
force to make the following

Recommendation:

that all programs review the balance of responsibilities carried by each
faculty member to ensure a fair and equitable, but not necessarily
identical, distribution of tasks.

For example

On the basis of Virginia Commonwealth University's strategic
planning efforts (which included all the faculty), each faculty member
has negotiated a contract that details his or her intended contributions
to the program in the four areas of responsibility listed above. The
balance among the areas varies according to the strengths and interests
of each faculty member and the needs of the department and institution
and are to be renegotiated periodically.

Table 3 shows the demographic characteristics of the physics faculty in
Virginia: the total headcount, their average age, and the rounded
percentage of them who are white, black, other minority, male, and
female.

As its age distribution suggests, a large number of Virginia's physics
faculty -- like those elsewhere in the nation -- were hired in the
academic boomtime of the first few decades after World War II, and in
some longer-established programs a significant number are approaching
retirement age. This age distribution has two major effects on students.
First, in general older faculty members' predominately academic
experience often has not prepared them well to educate students for or
advise them about the current broader range of career options. Secondly,
the lack of non-academic employment experiences makes them less able to
act as a nexus between potential industrial employers and graduating
students.

TABLE 3 FACULTYDEMOGRAPHICS IN PHYSICS

Institution

Mean age

% white

%
black

% otherminority

% male

%
female

CNU

43

89

0

11

89

11

GMU

51

81

5

14

62

38

JMU

53

100

0

0

100

0

LC

51

100

0

0

100

0

MWC

58

67

33

0

100

0

NSU

50

29

43

29

86

14

ODU

46

88

6

6

88

13

UVA

53

85

0

15

96

4

VCU

48

63

0

38

88

13

VPI

53

73

0

27

90

10

VSU

55

25

50

25

100

0

W&M

55

100

0

0

95

5

All

52

82

5

14

90

10

Faculty who are eligible for retirement or who qualify for one of the
state's buy-out programs sometimes do not take advantage of these
opportunities because they cannot, after retirement, continue to do what
they enjoy most: do physics and share this joy with students. In some
physics programs in the state, becoming an emeritus professor also
results in the loss of an office, telephone, access to computing
facilities and other supports that one has enjoyed as a faculty member.
Institutions who have significant numbers of physics faculty approaching
retirement age should evaluate their treatment of emeritus faculty and
make necessary changes to eliminate the fears of potential retirees. If
those fears were addressed at relatively modest cost, faculty members
might be more willing to retire, thus allowing for the recruitment of
the next generation of physicists.

When a program is able to hire new faculty members, it is sometimes
stymied by the unavailability of start-up funding, the money necessary
to set up a laboratory and research program. Faculty and administrators
at several of the institutions visited by the task force noted the lack
of resources that could be devoted to both attracting and kick-starting
the career of a promising young scientist. The problem is also evident
when an institution attempts to recruit a well-known mid-career scientist
at another academic or industrial research institution. Such hires
should be balanced against departments' needs for a more even age
distribution; at the same time, they can add great scientific stature to
a department and more than compensate for the buy-in cost with the
subsequent sponsored research funds that follow these pedigreed
scientists. As the world-class US industrial research labs (IBM, AT&T,
Xerox, Exxon, etc.) have downsized over the last five years, and as the
turmoil continues in the former Soviet Union, a large number of
first-rate mature physicists have become available for academic
positions. However, the competition for them has been fierce, and only
the larger, more endowed institutions nationally have been able to
afford the startup costs. To the degree that Virginia can attract more
of these world-class scientists, it will simultaneously raise the
scientific stature of the Commonwealth's physics departments, give
students a look at industrial career options, and have a net positive
influence on the research budget.

Recommendation:

that the institutions ensure the continued vitality of their physics
programs through creative early-retirement programs and emeritus
options, as well as through adequate start-up funding for new faculty
who are both at the beginning and in the middle of their careers. For
their part, programs should, without compromising in the least their
academic standards, work to increase the representation of physicists
experienced in work outside the academy and women and minority
physicists, as well as to develop a better age distribution among their
faculty.

The statistics for Virginia's science departments show that the student
statistics do not reflect the demographics of the Commonwealth or even
of higher education with respect to women and minorities, as Table 4
demonstrates. Of Virginia's 424 upper-division undergraduates majoring
in physics in 1994-95, 86 percent were white, eight percent black, and
five percent other minority; 82 percent were male, 18 percent female.
There were 252 graduate students studying physics in the Commonwealth in
1994-95, of which 84 percent were white, 5 percent black, and 11 percent
other minority; 86 percent were male, with 14 percent females.

Consequently, the total number and percentage of physics degrees awarded
to women and African-Americans in Virginia is low, even for the physical
sciences.(11) The degree production for the past three years, for
instance, is displayed in the following table:

Although Virginia does better than the nation at recruiting women and
minority students and faculty into physics, the numbers and percentages
are still small.(12) The task force therefore concludes that the
Virginia physics community needs to intensify its efforts to recruit and
retain a diverse student body and faculty until they constitute a solid
presence in that community.

This is important for several reasons. First, if the physics profession
is to enhance the scientific literacy of the citizens of the United
States and the Commonwealth, it is crucial that the knowledge of physics
not be confined to the "majority" (actually in the minority) population.
Moreover, any profession is enriched by the diversification of its
practitioners, since people from different backgrounds can often bring a
fresh point of view and different talents to collaborative work. But
most pragmatically, the enrollment problems faced by some physics
programs could be alleviated by such a significant broadening of the
pool of students to whom they appeal. Nationally, fewer than a half of 1
percent (the annual average for 1989-1994 was about 4900) of bachelor's
degrees are in physics. The American Institute of Physics has identified
750 undergraduate institutions that award that degree. Thus colleges
have on average about 6.5 majors per year.(13) Since the Council
considers unproductive any baccalaureate program that graduates on
average fewer than five majors per year, it is very much in the interest
of the physics programs in the state to encourage and provide
opportunities for women and minority students to major in physics and
thereby significantly increase their enrollments. And finally, the state
benefits from the increased production of knowledge workers.

Typically, undergraduate recruitment is done at the institutional rather
than at the departmental level. So in order for departments to have an
effect on the recruitment of a diverse group of students likely to have
an interest in physics, they need to develop effective working
relationships with their admissions offices. High schools with strong
science programs or above- average minority populations need to be
identified, and physics faculty need to recruit actively from them
students who will major in science and engineering disciplines in
college. Many of the physics departments of Virginia institutions have
effective outreach programs with teachers in the local schools, and
these personal contacts could be valuable in identifying and nurturing
qualified women and minorities.

Longwood College receives information from the College Board
about students in the south central region who have indicated an
interest in science or engineering. It then sends those students
information about the Longwood program, including its 3 + 2 physics and
engineering articulation agreement with Old Dominion University.
Students cite the personal letters and phone calls as one of the reasons
they were attracted to Longwood, which has physics enrollments two or
three times those typical for institutions of its size and reportedly a
hospitable environment for women and minority majors.

One particularly successful program for the recruitment and
retention of minority students is the Dozoretz National Institute for
Minorities in Applied Science (DNIMAS) program at Norfolk State
University. This is funded by private donations and state appropriations
and provides full academic scholarships for undergraduate study in the
scientific disciplines. Minority students are identified and recruited
nationally. In each science department, the students have a faculty
mentor who is involved in their academic program, offers career advice,
and informs them of available research opportunities. In addition, the
students have special housing and this, coupled with their academic
program, creates a strong sense of community.

Unlike undergraduate admissions, graduate recruitment is usually done at
the departmental level, either by a faculty committee responsible for
all graduate affairs or by a separate graduate admissions committee.
This gives departments more control over the diversity of the entering
graduate class. Because no descriptions of special recruitment efforts
were included in the reports to the task force, it is impossible to
summarize here the efforts that programs are making. It is the task
force's impression that most departments rely heavily on standardized
tests, such as the Graduate Record Examinations, in sorting graduate
applications. Admissions committees should be made aware that there is
no agreement that standardized test results are highly correlated with
research performance and success in graduate school.

The representation of minorities and women in Virginia's graduate
programs is even lower than at the undergraduate level, as Table 4
showed. Every attempt should be made to actively recruit and attract
women and minorities into graduate programs at Virginia universities
through networking and professional contacts. A department chair's
commitment to increasing the fraction of women in a graduate program can
be strikingly successful. For instance, under the leadership of an
aggressive department chair, Howard Georgi, female representation in the
incoming class to Harvard's Ph.D. physics program was significantly
improved, to nearly 40 percent.

In both the nation and the Commonwealth, the graduate applicant pool
includes both national and international students. Clearly foreign
students, from a range of countries and ethnicities, do provide valuable
cultural and racial diversity and ensure that institutions can pick,
train, and possibly enrich America's workforce with the best and
brightest from the entire world. But these considerations need to be
balanced with the need for Virginia's institutions to focus their
educational efforts on qualified Virginians and other Americans, if only
because those students are most likely to work in Virginia and the
United States after graduation.

As a group, the state's physics programs have done a good job of keeping
their admissions decisions in balance. Of the students studying physics
in Virginia at all levels, two-thirds are Virginians, just over a
quarter are non-Virginian US citizens, and only seven percent are
foreign residents. Only the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech
have substantial numbers of foreign students at the graduate level: they
constitute over a third of the UVA graduate group and just under half of
Tech's. These two institutions' physics departments should continue to
monitor carefully their graduate admission statistics to ensure equity and
maintain an appropriate balance.

Recommendation:

that the physics programs in the Commonwealth diversify their graduate
populations, and that they not rely exclusively on foreign students to
do so.

The underrepresentation of minorities and women on physics faculties in
the United States is significantly greater than in the other physical
sciences, particularly at Ph.D-granting institutions.(14) Unless they
constitute a "strong minority of at least 15 percent,"(15) women and
minority faculty are apt to feel isolated. Such persons are invaluable
as role models, mentors, advocates for special concerns, and "existence
proofs" for students. Until qualified women and minority faculty are actively
recruited by the physics community, the discipline will continue to have
problems attracting, educating, and retaining large, currently
uninvolved segments of the student population.

The most important factor influencing retention of women and minority
students and faculty is the treatment of them in the department.
Regardless of gender or ethnicity, all students should have equal access
to research opportunities, be able to satisfy their intellectual
curiosity, and be encouraged to develop professionally to their full
potential. In 1990 the American Physical Society (APS) and the National
Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored site visits aimed at improving the
climate for women in physics departments. The report identifies some
common problems, such as the absence of female faculty, especially those
who have successfully combined a career and family; poor communication
with the department chair; various forms of harassment and no effective
procedures to deal with them; and the absence of other kinds of support.
It also suggests many solutions, including faculty recruitment, improved
communication, and a safe and supportive environment.(16) While the
report focuses on women, the problems and most of the recommendations
are transferable to any minority population.

Support networks help improve the academic and social climate for women
and minorities. As we have mentioned, the Society of Physics Students
(SPS) can be very effective in connecting undergraduate students to each
other, the faculty, the department, and the APS. At several institutions
graduate students and/or faculty women have organized "women in physics"
or campuswide "women in science" groups or established chapters of
national organizations such as the Association for Women in Science
(AWIS) or the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE). These have been
most successful when they involve women at every level -- undergraduate,
graduate and faculty. They provide a support network and a forum for
discussing professional concerns of particular relevance to women. The
solidarity and sense of community help improve the climate in physics
and integrate women into the profession.

Recommendation:

that the physics programs in Virginia actively recruit and remove all
barriers to the retention and promotion of qualified women and minority
faculty.

For example:

The University of Virginia was one of five departments and the
only one in Virginia that was included in the original APS/NSF site
visits, thus demonstrating national leadership and a commitment to
improve the climate for women in physics. The report from the site visit
identified the lack of women faculty as a major problem. Many of the
suggestions offered by the review team have been implemented, and these
have resulted in a significant improvement of the climate for all
members of that physics department. The recent recruitment by the
engineering school of astronaut Kathryn Thornton, herself a UVA physics
graduate, suggests the ways in which physics departments can grow their
own women and minority faculty members.

The State Council of Higher Education has a number of programs
designed to increase minority representation in higher education. Among
those that are most likely to be useful to physics programs and in which
they should become involved on their campuses are the Summer Program for
Undergraduate Virginians, designed to inform undergraduate other-race
Virginians about graduate education and allow them to experience it
during a summer session, and three graduate fellowship programs: the
State Graduate Deans' Fellowship Program, the Commonwealth Graduate
Fellowship Program, and the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB)
Doctoral Scholars Program, all designed to increase the number of
other-race students enrolled in graduate programs who will subsequently
undertake academic careers.

The NSF's Alliances for Minority Participation (AMP) takes as its
aim "to strengthen and encourage the production of baccalaureate degrees
earned by students from minority groups underrepresented in science and
engineering." The NSF has allocated more than $27 million in 1997 for
these activities.(17)

In order to provide high-quality instruction in physics, it is essential
that well-equipped modern laboratories, quality teaching space, adequate
storage space, computers, library resources, and a shop for repairing
and fabricating equipment (staffed by faculty, technicians, and student
project assistants). Departmental facilities should be consistent with
their programs' goals, mission and curricula.

According to information provided in the self-study reports, the amount
of assignable space per teaching faculty member for the physics
departments varied up to almost threefold within the same institutional
type. At the four Ph.D.-granting institutions, the amount of space
dedicated to the physics departments varied from 35,000 square feet to
91,000 square feet, with three of them between 35,000 square feet and
almost 42,000 square feet. This comes to between about 1400 and 2600
assignable square feet per teaching faculty member. For those
institutions whose highest degree level in physics is the master's, the
total space allocation varied from about 6800 square feet to 17,000
square feet, or from about 950 to almost 1700 square feet per teaching
faculty member. The space allocation for departments offering Bachelor
of Science level programs varied from almost 6000 square feet to almost
12,600 square feet, or from approximately 1250 to 5200 square feet per
teaching faculty member. There are reasons for the differences,
including variations in what is counted in that space, the amount of
sponsored research, and the numbers of staff and faculty who are funded
by those grants. But institutions at the far extremes might want to
review their space allocations.

Two institutions, having done so, are in the process of making major
changes in their facilities: Mary Washington College is currently
planning a new facility, and a new building to house portions of the
departments of physics and oceanography is presently being constructed
at Old Dominion University. This new building will have 45,000 square
feet for the department of physics, and it will replace the space that
the department now occupies in another building.

Several departments have expanded their research facilities by forming
partnerships or linkages with research centers and scientific
laboratories located both in and outside of the Commonwealth. For
example, the Tidewater universities all have active involvements with
the nearby Jefferson Lab and NASA Langley Research Center. Virginia
State University has a particularly close relationship with the
Tri-University Meson Facility (TRIUMF) in Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada. As a result of these linkages, students and faculty at these
universities have access to the excellent research opportunities
available at these facilities. This kind of cooperation will become
increasingly important as the National Science Foundation gets out of
the business of modernizing facilities under the Academic Research
Infrastructure Program. The 1997 NSF budget request follows the Vice
President's National Performance Review's recommendation that
responsibility for "the upgrading and renovating of university
laboratories" be turned over to the states, local communities, and
institutions.(18)

Although all institutions are directly or indirectly accessing a
supercomputer for computational purposes, other computational equipment
and facilities vary widely among the institutions. Physics students and
faculty members at the institutions also have varying capabilities to
access the resources available on the Internet and the World Wide Web
for instructional and research activities. The 1996 General Assembly
made a generous allocation to the colleges and universities as part of
the Higher Education Equipment Trust Fund (see the "Technology
Appropriation" line in Table 6 in the next section) to help them upgrade
their computer and telecommunications capacities. In addition to
supporting their academic programs, a few institutions are using their
computational resources to provide services to local communities.

Like any other program at a college or university, the physics program
incurs costs and provides benefits for the students, the university, the
community, and the advancement of disciplinary knowledge. Many of the
benefits and even the costs are difficult to measure because of
insufficient data. They are especially difficult to compare, because of
the noncomparability of the data that are available. Moreover,
despite often feeling underappreciated on the contributory side and
undersupported on the cost side, most faculty have been reluctant to do
a serious cost/benefit analysis of their work. This problem is not
confined to physics programs. But in these tight fiscal times, given the
relatively high costs of and few majors in physics programs, it is
especially in their interest to have complete and reliable data with
which to make a reasoned case for the resources that they need and the
contributions that they make. It is also critical for physics
departments to understand how they fit into the broader college or
university picture of program costs, so that they can respond reasonably
to administrative decisions.

The cost data submitted by the institutions represent such a wide range
of reporting formats and specificity, and they differ enough from those
obtained through a May 1996 request by the American Physical Society on
our behalf, that few reliable assertions or comparisons can profitably
be made, beyond the one that the cost-to-student-credit-hour ratio is
greater (roughly one and a half times the average in those institutions
that made the calculation) than that of the average program. This leads
to the

Recommendation:

that the physics programs in Virginia, with the aid of their
institutional fiscal officers, regularly track their costs and
contributions, and that those data be made available to all members of
the department. Deans and provosts should collect comparable data about
all programs and make them generally available, in order to promote
responsible dialogue about the distribution of resources and the
expectations that they have of each department. The State Council of
Higher Education should develop a uniform cost/benefit analysis model to
facilitate this process.

Because of their relatively modest enrollment in the major, if not in
their service courses, physics programs cannot generally point to the
production of large numbers of student credit hours as a major benefit
that they provide to the institution. However, they are often among the
top departments in obtaining external grant support, with its benefit of
overhead return to the institution. The degree to which this is possible
varies, of course, by institutional type. But even programs in
predominately teaching institutions can seek external support for work
connected to their teaching missions, including student support,
visiting lecturers, teaching equipment, work with the local schools, or
curricular innovations. To give only a few examples, the Virginia Space
Grant Consortium awards undergraduate research scholarships and graduate
fellowships for students whose work is related to aerospace science. The
American Physical Society provides a list of women physicists who are
willing to come to campus for lectures. The Department of Education
administers the Eisenhower Program, through which colleges bring up to
date in their disciplines high-school teachers who teach science and
mathematics. Finally, the National Science Foundation's recent
presentation to the 104th Congress's Second Session stressed that "in a
set of activities ranging from Research Experiences for Undergraduates
through comprehensive undergraduate education reform, graduate
traineeships, and awards to new investigators with both research and
education objectives, NSF emphasizes the ties between research and
education and moves to reinforce them."(19)

With federal research support flat or even declining, industrial support
and research related to local economic development should provide an
increasing base of support for physics-related research. Benefits that
such support brings the institution in addition to money include the
development of additional career contacts and paths for students, the
disciplinary and community recognition that first-rate research brings
to the institution, and some overhead return to further support the
institution (a portion of which should be returned to the department to
encourage future entrepreneurial activities).

Therefore the task force makes the following

Recommendation:

that physics programs develop strategies to obtain or increase external
funding, including funds for the teaching mission and industrial support
for research.

Physics relies very heavily on laboratory and computing equipment for
research (generally paid for by grant funds) and teaching (for which the
Higher Education Equipment Trust Fund [HEETF] is the major resource).
The Higher Education Equipment Trust Fund has been extremely beneficial
to all equipment-intensive disciplines in the state. But when the task
force visiting teams asked departments about the HEETF funds available,
most did not know the amount of these funds that had been awarded to the
institution, much less how and what amount their administrations had
decided to allocate funds to the department. Some departments were not
even prepared -- for instance with lists of needed equipment -- to spend
the money should it become available. The 1996 General Assembly made a
significant investment in equipment, including sums to cover equipment
deficiencies and obsolescence and a special appropriation for teaching
technology and some aspects of infrastructure development, as Table 6
demonstrates. Departments will need to be prepared to act quickly in
order to spend this money effectively.

TABLE 6HIGHER EDUCATION EQUIPMENT TRUST FUND
APPROPRIATIONS

Institutions

1996-97

1997-98

1996-98

TechnologyAppropriation

Obsolescence& Deficiency

Total

TechnologyAppropriation

Obsolescence& Deficiency

Total

TechnologyAppropriation

Obsolescence& Deficiency

Total

GMU

$1,791,007

$3,394,183

$5,185,190

$1,791,006

$3,394,183

$5,185,189

$3,582,013

$6,788,366

$10,370,379

ODU

$1,482,882

$1,065,378

$2,548,260

$1,482,881

$1,065,378

$2,548,259

$2,965,763

$2,130,756

$5,096,519

UVA

$2,495,435

$3,491,744

$5,987,179

$2,495,434

$3,491,744

$5,987,178

$4,990,869

$6,983,488

$11,974,357

VCU

$2,495,224

$1,676,562

$4,171,786

$2,495,223

$1,676,562

$4,171,785

$4,990,447

$3,353,124

$8,343,571

VPI

$2,899,712

$4,658,488

$7,558,200

$2,899,711

$4,658,488

$7,558,199

$5,799,423

$9,316,976

$15,116,399

W&M

$997,754

$319,258

$1,317,012

$997,754

$319,258

$1,317,012

$1,995,508

$638,516

$2,634,024

CNU

$522,855

$5,091

$527,946

$522,854

$5,091

$527,945

$1,045,709

$10,182

$1,055,891

CVC

$199,928

$0

$199,928

$199,927

$0

$199,927

$399,855

$0

$399,855

JMU

$940,199

$217,682

$1,157,881

$940,199

$217,682

$1,157,881

$1,880,398

$435,364

$2,315,762

LC

$262,255

$0

$262,255

$262,255

$0

$262,255

$524,510

$0

$524,510

MWC

$569,713

$96,596

$666,309

$569,712

$96,596

$666,308

$1,139,425

$193,192

$1,332,617

NSU

$1,146,657

$0

$1,146,657

$1,146,657

$0

$1,146,657

$2,293,314

$0

$2,293,314

RU

$840,044

$125,137

$965,181

$840,044

$125,137

$965,181

$1,680,088

$250,274

$1,930,362

VMI

$250,579

$88,348

$338,927

$250,579

$88,348

$338,927

$501,158

$176,696

$677,854

VSU

$789,712

$236,638

$1,026,350

$789,712

$236,638

$1,026,350

$1,579,424

$473,276

$2,052,700

RBC

$146,051

$29,973

$176,024

$146,051

$29,972

$176,023

$292,102

$59,945

$352,047

VCCS

$6,414,919

$0

$6,414,919

$6,414,918

$0

$6,414,918

$12,829,837

$0

$12,829,837

TOTAL

$24,244,926

$15,405,078

$39,650,004

$24,244,917

$15,405,077

$39,649,994

$48,489,843

$30,810,155

$79,299,998

Recommendations:

that central administrations allocate equipment money as quickly as
possible, that the departments make an effort to keep informed about the
institutional equipment allocation and what their share of it will be as
soon as is practicable, and that the departments provide their deans
with regularly updated lists of equipment that they need and the
benefits they will provide the program. All departmental faculty members
should contribute to the development of this list, which should be
congruent with a rolling departmental five-year plan for each program's
curricular and research development, adjusted as needed according to
what the department learns from its student assessment and graduate
tracking programs.

In Part III of this report, the task force suggested ways in which
departments could cooperate in offering students a wider range of
learning opportunities. The same kinds of cooperation could also
strengthen their research and the learning that occurs when
undergraduate and graduate students engage in advanced research
projects.

Through cooperation and sharing resources, Virginia's physics (and other
scientific and engineering departments) could, with existing state
resources, have much greater effect on research and education.
Simultaneously, they would become more attractive candidates for state,
federal, and private support for those activities. For instance, NSF is
proposing to increase its support for its Grant Opportunities for
Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) program by more than 40 percent
in 1997, to almost $18 million.(20) Subcritical research groups or
individual researchers requiring access to expensive instrumentation or
unique facilities have much to gain by multi-institutional
collaboration. The task force therefore makes the following

Recommendation:

that such research collaborations among Virginia's physics departments
be encouraged and supported.

For example:

The Virginia Physics Consortium (VPC) was organized in 1994 to
encourage collaborative activities among the Virginia university
graduate physics departments, with an initial focus on nuclear physics
research opportunities at the Jefferson Laboratory. The VPC has expanded
its charter to take advantage of the new Free Electron Laser User
Facility, presently under construction at Jefferson Lab, with initial
operations scheduled for 1998. The VPC is exploring a number of specific
mechanisms for encouraging cooperation among Virginia's universities,
including seed funding for multi-institution research proposals,
collaborative course development and teaching activities, graduate
fellowships, student internships, and faculty sabbaticals.

Existing collaborations involving physics departments have already
formed around the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton in aeronautics
and atmospheric sciences and the Jefferson Lab in both nuclear physics
and laser physics.

The Virginia Microelectronics Consortium (VMEC) was formed by
Virginia's engineering schools to take advantage of the impending
investment of $6 billion in microelectronic fabrication plants in
Virginia by Motorola, IBM, Toshiba, and Siemens. Electrical engineering
departments will take the lead in this consortium, but there will be
significant opportunities for Virginia's physics departments to develop
relevant courses and research programs in plasma processing, materials
physics, microelectronic device physics, and modeling.

A number of initiatives are forming in the Commonwealth to take
advantage of the ability to link universities to remote high-performance
computers for advanced modeling and computational physics and to link to
remote data acquisition and control of centralized research facilities
(such as light sources, telescopes, and particle accelerators). The
Southeastern University Research Association( SURA), which built one of
the original high-capacity computer networks linking the Virginia
universities with other universities in the Southeast (SURANET), is
proposing an upgrade to state-of-the-art networking capability (OC-3
trunk lines) and specific mechanisms for remote operation and data
logging on experimental equipment at the Jefferson Lab, other particle
accelerators and light sources operated by DOE, and telescopes operated
by the NSF and university consortia. Theoretical and computational
physicists can take advantage of this pooling of resources for
centralized operation and maintenance of expensive high performance
computing hardware and software.

The Applied Research Center in Newport News is a partnership among
the City of Newport News, Jefferson Laboratory, Old Dominion University,
Christopher Newport University and the College of William and Mary. It
was formed to sponsor applied research and development opportunities
created by the technology generated at the Jefferson Lab. Physics,
applied science, and engineering faculty at all three academic
institutions have solicited and received both Commonwealth and private
funding as a result of the partners' stated goals to collaborate,
leverage existing resources, and focus on opportunities arising from the
Jefferson Lab's Free Electron Laser Facility. The City of Newport News
broke ground in May 1996 for a 120,000-square-foot building on the
Jefferson Lab site to house the Center's activities. The industrial
research park associate with Virginia Tech is a similar partnership.

The task force encourages the faculty of the Commonwealth's physics
departments to take advantage of the interdisciplinary research centers
that have already been established, attained critical mass, and earned a
noteworthy reputation among peers. The Commonwealth already has a number
of such centers that have been initiated and nurtured by Commonwealth
(through the Center for Innovative Technology, or CIT) and federal
(usually NSF) funds. Often these centers have an engineering focus, such
as the NSF-sponsored center for polymer science and the CIT center for
photonics at Virginia Tech. However, there is mutual benefit in physics
department participation in such centers: physicists can add scientific
breadth to the center's activities while developing an applied physics
focus for faculty research and student training.

Why should an individual or group of physics faculty members participate
in any of the partnerships or alliances cited as examples in this
report? The obvious benefits come from the strength of the partnership
in attracting and using resources more effectively than can small groups
or individuals. Partnerships and shared ventures are particularly
valuable models for research, development, and the associated
college-level training because of the expense of these ventures and the
stagnation of state and federal funding for these activities. The task
force encourages the Commonwealth's academic institutions and the
legislature to recognize the inherent and economic value of such
partnerships and to support their growth.

Colleen Cordes and Paulette V. Walker, "Ability to Win Grants
Increasingly Dictates Clout of Departments Within Universities,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 June 1996, p. A14. Much of this shift
is due to the cancellation of big national facilities such as the
Superconducting Supercollider and the move into a new era of
international cooperation in developing such big projects.

Amy Pendergast, ed., The Liberal Art of Science (Washington, DC:
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1990), p. xi.

The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993 (Princeton: National
Association of Scholars, 1996), p. 53.

"What Research Says About Improving Undergraduate Education: Twelve
Attributes of Good Practice," AAHE Bulletin, April 1996. The twelve
attributes are:

high expectations

respect for diverse talents and learning styles

emphasis on the early years of study

coherence in learning

synthesizing experiences

ongoing practice of learned skills

integrating education and experience

active learning

assessment and prompt feedback

collaboration

adequate time on task

out-of-class contact with faculty

The confidence of high-school students who excel in mathematics and
science extends to those in low-income groups, who plan to attend
four-year colleges in greater numbers than their peers from the same
income group and at about the same rate as that for all SAT takers. See
Jacqueline E. King, The Decision to Go to College: Attitudes and
Experiences Associated with College Attendance Among Low-Income Students
(Washington, DC: College Board, 1996).

In 1994, the comparable figures in Virginia for all the physical
sciences, including physics, were that women receive 39 percent of the
bachelor's degrees and 29 percent of the master's and Ph.d.s; blacks are
awarded 8 percent of the bachelor's degrees, 6 percent of the master's,
and 3 percent of the doctorates. This compares favorably with the 1995
national figure for doctorates in the physical sciences earned by women,
which the National Research Council puts at 22 percent, and by blacks,
which was at 1.3 percent (Denise K. Magner, "More Black Ph.D.'s,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 June 1996, p. A26).

According to unpublished data of the American Physical Society, the
comparable national figures for physics degrees granted are as follows:

Total

Black

Female

Baccalaureate

4615

180
(4%)

792 (17%)

Master's *

822

21
(2%)

153 (14%)

Doctorate

1481

11
(1%)

184 (12%)

* The master's figures cannot be compared to Virginia's, since they
include only individuals with professional but not terminal master's
degrees.

According to the same data source, the national figures on faculty are
even more dismal: less than 2 percent of national physics faculty are
black and 6 percent are female, compared to Virginia's 5 percent black
and 10 percent female.

AIP, p. 12. At the baccalaureate-only institutions, the numbers were
even lower: between 1989-94 slightly more than 2000 degrees were awarded
by about 490 institutions, for an average of 4.1 per institution per
year.